I leave comments enabled so that people can tell me when I'm wrong.
Because sometimes I am. I absolutely get off on a serious rant
sometimes and forget to think about what I'm saying. and I appreciate
it when people hold me accountable for what I say.
But you know who else is wrong sometimes? The majority. Winston
Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except
for every other form of government, specifically for that reason: that
sometimes majority-rule leads to bad decisions. Slavery didn't suddenly
become wrong when public opinion turned against it; it was always
wrong.
The founding fathers were smart for a number of reasons, not the
least of which was that they knew the best counterbalance to the
“tyranny of the majority” is free speech. The minority absolutely must
have the right to speak up when they think that the majority is wrong.
As one of my critics pointed out, the people spoke. I (in the role
of the minority) believe that the majority got it wrong, and made a
shortsighted decision. Note that I didn't say that the election was
rigged, or aruge for the violent overthrow of the government, or
anything like that. I accept the process and the outcome; I'm just
bitterly disappointed, and my personal faith in the collective sense of
my fellow citizens is diminished somewhat. I also lay some of the blame
on Kerry and the Democrats for making a number of mistakes and poorly
articulating their position. But in the end, like Churchill, I know of
no other form of government better than this one, and so we soldier on
with the Great Experiment.
There are lots of accusations of fraud and irregularities
out there; a quick glance doesn't show any that would throw the
presidential election the other way, though I can't say what it would
mean for state or local elections. But this is another place where the
founding fathers got it right: the electoral system, for all its
faults, localizes election fraud to within a state. If we elected a
president by popular vote, that would not be the case. There will
always be fraud and irregularities; the best that we can hope for is to
control its impact. I do wish that we'd go back and address the two
ways in which the electoral system has been “gamed” — one, by having
electors announce their support for a candidate; and two, by allowing
states to decide their electors as a bloc instead of more granular.
Granted, the Constitution explicitly grants the states the right to
decide on their own the method of choosing electors; still; we've
departed from what the Founding Fathers had in mind, and we ought to
have a serious debate about whether we have diminished the election
process by doing so. In many ways I think this is as fundamental an
issue as campaign reform, which menas of course that it has no hope of
getting a serious hearing. Wouldn't it be nice to have just a few real
statesmen and stateswomen in D.C. instead of just the usual set of
politicians on both sides of the aisle?
[Kevin Schofield's Weblog]